u/jexo10

Firefox, vlc, android, the linux kernel running inside most of the internet's servers, chromium which chrome and edge are both built on, a huge chunk of what runs every website

none of it has an ad campaign, none of it has a brand most people could name, and most people using it have no idea it exists let alone that it's open source

the foundation the whole internet sits on was largely built by people contributing code for free and nobody really talks about it

Lost my phone last year and had to borrow some random guy's phone to call my mum.

Completely blank. I've been calling her number basically my whole life and apparently never bothered to actually remember it. Didn't know my dad's either, so I ended up calling my own number and just hoping someone picked up.

Up up down down left right left right b a though, no problem. The konami code has been stuck in my head since 1999.

The brain really decided phone numbers weren't worth keeping but cheat codes were somehow important.

My sister asked me where a bunch of old family photos were and I said "they're backed up."

Then she asked where.

I genuinely had no answer. Some are in google photos, some are on an old laptop, some are probably in icloud and there's another folder on a hard drive somewhere.

Nothing is really lost anymore, but finding the thing you actually want can still be a whole project.

Ran a random script off github yesterday without reading it properly. one guy maintaining it, 400 stars, last updated seven months ago

would never install something from a popup ad from a company i'd never heard of. but the github thing felt fine for some reason

genuinely cannot explain the logic there

I was looking for a important doc yesterday and had no idea where I'd saved it on my laptop.

Went through my downloads, messages, google drive, local drive then found it in a random folder because i downloaded some other flies in that and accidently used that folder as the last download location path.

Physical clutter at least has the decency to be visible. Digital clutter just keeps multiplying because there's basically no reason to ever delete anything

Had a problem with something last week and went through the company's support thing first.

It had only a ai chatbot option and no way to contact a real person, then the help articles, then the chatbot sending me back to the same help article. Gave up and searched reddit, someone had the answer for the specify problem in comment section

Feels like actual customer support is slowly becoming "here's some dumb ai bot which will give same repeated ans, good luck trying to solve your problem" and the customer gets stuck without any solution if they dont know how to look for solution in other places

Tried reddit search yesterday for something specific. got results from completely different subreddits about completely different topics sorted by something i didn't ask for

opened google, typed the same thing with reddit at the end of search text, found the exact thread in the first result

reddit has had years to fix this. google solved it by accident

Adobe stopped selling software and moved everything to subscriptions. microsoft followed for office. now some smaller apps are doing the same thing one by one

used to buy a version, own it, use it until you decided to upgrade. now cancel the subscription and everything you made with it becomes inaccessible

nobody voted for this arrangement. it just became the default while everyone was busy using the software

My mom still has three old cannon powershots sitting in a kitchen drawer. Bought somewhere between 2006 and 2010 and nobody thought they were anything special at the time

Checked ebay last week and saw one of the same models going for $85. The thing that was basically a cheap clearance camera is now being bought because people want that old digicam look

She has no idea they're worth anything and I'm not sure if i told her their value she will be ready to sell thoese old cameras because of the old memories

Followed a tutorial for half an hour before i noticed a comment saying "this hasn't worked since the 2023 update, here's what actually does it now"

the comment was two years old. the article was still ranking first on google with no disclaimer, no update, nothing

the author never came back. some random person in the comments did the job for them

Took me three weeks to pick a laptop. not because i didn't know what i wanted, because every time i got close someone online convinced me i was about to make a mistake

ended up buying the first one that I rejected multiple times beacuse of dumb reasons online. spent three weeks getting there

Google for me. killed google reader in 2013, small thing in isolation, but it was the moment i stopped trusting that anything they built would stick around. stopped investing time into their products after that

thirteen years later and they've killed so many things that there's a website dedicated to tracking it. reader was just the first time i noticed the pattern

what's yours